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Looking Forward

Reading these predictions about how AI will change the game for everyone in the next five years made me wonder if there any specific tipping point that makes all this possible for a technology that dates way back. There are similarities between this hype-cycle and the one over Big Data - it was going to be the Holy Grail that businesses must find or perish. That used to be the sentiment until it was not and it sounds like with LLM we might have gone as big as reasonable, feasible and useful:

Shortly after OpenAI released GPT-4, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that he thought the era of “giant, giant” models was over. The strategy of throwing ever more text at ever more neurons had reached a point of diminishing returns. Among other challenges, he said, OpenAI was bumping up against the physical limits of how many data centers the company owned or could build.

So beyond this point, it is about using the technology to produce value. The novelty with LLM (as manifested via ChatGPT) compared to most other buzzy technology (Big Data, Blockchain, Crypto, IoT and more) is the proximity to the end user. Even my mother knows about ChatGPT and has opinions on it. Her only contact with technology is YouTube and WhatApp - she does not even know to type on a key-board and gets overwhelmed if required to turn up the volume or brightness of her tablet. 

When a technology achieves this level of mass penetration at launch, things start to shape out very differently. My mother might as well build her own chatbot - she is only limited by her imagination (which she has plenty of) as not much else is needed. 

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